Tag «frontiers of science»

Economists from HSE University, together with colleagues from international universities, have analysed stock market movements over almost a century and proposed an investment strategy that could have delivered returns nearly twice as high as the market average. Their research suggests following a momentum strategy during periods of sustained market growth and switching to a value strategy after prolonged market declines. The study has been published in the Journal of Banking and Finance.

Researchers at HSE University have examined how communication difficulties in children with autism are related to brain function. The findings show that not only language networks but also attention networks play an important role. The weaker the connections involved in maintaining focus and switching attention, the more pronounced communication difficulties were. The study has been published in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Why do some people voluntarily follow new rules while others ignore them? Researchers at HSE University have found that the answer lies not so much in people's willingness to cooperate, as previously believed, but in their ability to empathise with others. Empathy proved to be the strongest predictor of whether people chose to wear face masks voluntarily during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings have been published in Frontiers.

Researchers at HSE University, in collaboration with colleagues from the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FIAN), have developed a method for rapidly determining how firmly a film is bonded to a substrate. This is important for the creation of ultrahigh-frequency acoustic filters, which are key components of next-generation 5G and 6G communications. For the first time, researchers have succeeded in measuring the lateral rigidity of the bond between a two-dimensional material film and a substrate in this way. The study results have been published in Applied Physics Letters.

A team of Russian researchers, including scientists from HSE University–St Petersburg, has developed the first open multimodal dataset containing recordings of brain activity, heart function, and video observations to help researchers understand what happens in the human brain during deep concentration. In the future, the dataset could accelerate the development of neural interfaces, rehabilitation technologies, and AI systems. The article has been published in Scientific Data.

An international group of researchers, including mathematicians from the AI and Digital Science Institute at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science, has provided a theoretical justification for a simple and computationally efficient method of estimating uncertainty in Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The paper has been published on the scientific preprint server arXiv.org and presented at AISTATS 2026.

In corporations, sports, and academia, people often face challenges they cannot handle alone. In such cases, selecting the right team is crucial. Tatiana Mayskaya, Associate Professor at the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences and the International College of Economics and Finance, together with colleagues from foreign universities, examined team characteristics and found that less diverse teams are better suited to objectives where a high average performance is important, whereas more diverse teams are preferable when avoiding failure is critical. The paper has been published in Economic Theory.

Economists at HSE University have examined how smokers respond to changes in cigarette prices. When tobacco prices increase, cigarette consumption does not always decline. In fact, spending on tobacco may even rise: according to the researchers, a 1% decrease in cigarette affordability leads to a 0.28% increase in per capita tobacco expenditure. The findings suggest that to reduce smoking rates, tobacco prices must rise faster than household incomes. The study has been published in Voprosy Statistiki.